Davidson in­di­cated that he had first-hand knowl­edge of the con­di­tions in the na­tion’s prisons and de­clared that re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion was “al­most im­pos­si­ble”.

“It feels like you are ac­tu­ally de­stroy­ing a hu­man be­ing,” said Davidson, who was giv­ing ex­pert tes­ti­mony yes­ter­day dur­ing Causwell’s sen­tenc­ing hear­ing in the Home Cir­cuit Court.

“I was hop­ing that our [pe­nal] sys­tem would have come up with some­thing that doesn’t de­stroy peo­ple, but give them a chance to right the wrong,” said the head of Fam­ily Life Min­istries.

The 40-year-old busi­ness­man was sched­uled to be sen­tenced yes­ter­day for killing his ex-girl­friend, Na­dia Mitchell, at her Oak­land apart­ment in 2008. How­ever, the sen­tenc­ing was post­poned for a sec­ond time as pre­sid­ing judge Carol Lawrence-Beswick said she needed more time to con­sider le­gal ar­gu­ments made by his lead at­tor­ney, Jac­que­line Sa­muels-Brown.

It came as Sa­muels-Brown, in ad­dress­ing the court, pointed to ev­i­dence pre­sented dur­ing the trial that Causwell at­tempted to re­sus­ci­tate Mitchell on the day her body was found in the yard at her gated apart­ment com­plex and sug­gested that this showed how much re­spect he had for her. “Re­spect?” Pren­der­gast interrupted. Her grand­mother and other rel­a­tives tried fran­ti­cally to si­lence her, but the teen would have none of it.

Af­ter shak­ing free from her grand­mother’s grasp, an emo­tional Pren­der­gast ad­mon­ished Sa­muels-Brown: “Don’t talk about re­spect when he is there beat­ing my mother.” She then stormed out of the court­room. Sa­muels-Brown re­sumed her sub­mis­sion, as­sert­ing: “I am al­most cer­tain that was con­trived.”